Employee Satisfaction Management

Understanding employee satisfaction is a multi-dimensional task. Being able to objectively appraise the mood of your employees is essential for productivity. Moreover, many people know it is also important for sales performance.

Many companies use employee satisfaction surveys to gauge employee opinion. Some have related employee satisfaction to job turnover. Few, however, have successfully appraised the benefit of employee satisfaction to sales performance. Doing so requires a sound understanding of what drives sales performance which, to be honest, few companies really have.

RedRoute’s unique ENP model of motivation fills this gap. We measure the drivers of employee satisfaction so you can manage it. We measure the relationships between employee satisfaction, job turnover and sales – objectively, net of other influences.

You can therefore see the full ROI of your investments into managing employee satisfaction, understand how much you need to spend – and on what – to drive it up, and communicate the results internally in ways that really connect with every level in the business.

How It Works

The service begins with surveying (usually via low cost online survey methods) your employees to understand their opinions on the five key perceptual dimensions about their job that determine their behaviour:

- Relevancy; Identification; Accessibility; Value; Confidence

These five dimensions determine each employee’s “Effective Net Preference” (ENP) for working for your company. Manage it well and they will stay longer, give you more satisfied customers, and ultimately add a few percent to company performance that will leave others in your industry wondering how you achieve it.

Understanding the dimensions

Relevancy is the employee’s perception that their job ‘is right for them’. This requires understanding each individual’s career stage; life stage, ambitions and skills.

Identification is degree to which they are proud to work for the company. The better your corporate image, the better they will feel. It is not about size of company, it is about the mix of professional and social ethics the company stands for, and its role (and the image and role of its products and services) within the community.

Accessibility is functional. It ranges from commute time and effort, to working conditions, management dialogue, openness and willingness to listen, to perceived ability to progress within the organisation.

Value is about remuneration. As it all walks of life, there is trade-off between money and reward and in employee terms that balance needs to be right or they will look elsewhere. Judging their view on that balance is key to managing turnover rates.

Confidence is about perceptions of job security, of the perceived honesty and fairness of immediate management, and the belief that the company will act in the best interests of its employees. Confidence has waned substantially across the whole of Europe over the past 30 years, especially amongst bigger companies. Needless to say it is often stronger in smaller, less remote organisations.

Put employee opinion on each of these five criteria together, with appropriate weightings between them based on industry norms, and we derive the overall ENP score for the company, for the division, the department, the location and so on. The ENP score has a high correlation with simple metrics such as “Overall, how satisfied are you in your current role?” and “Overall, how willing would you be to recommend working at your company to friends and relatives?” but it’s key advantage over those metrics is the diagnostics that enable you to know what areas you need to work on in order to improve overall employee satisfaction and the trade-off’s between them.

But we do not stop there.

Our data analytics relate ENP scores to job turnover rates across differing areas of your business and, where relevant, over time. If sufficient back data exists, for example using data from previous surveys you have run in the past, we can also relate Employee Satisfaction/ENP to its influence, net of other factors, on sales performance. Very few employee satisfaction specialists can provide that type of offer. It means you can understand the full ROI benefits of your HR investments, now and on-going.

Process

To explore our ESM programme usually begins with a discussion with the HR department about what current data exists, the nature of the business and its various divisions, structures and influences, and the probable objectives for the programme.

If previous data exists, an exploratory analysis of the relationship between employee satisfaction and sales performance can be undertaken. If not, we will help you design (using our proprietary ES questionnaire designs) an in-house survey to gather the data needed to measure current levels of ENP and then develop an action programme to manage it.

The final step is then regular refreshes of the surveys. Unlike other organisations we do not recommend that this is done across the whole organisation once a year. We believe you should use phased programmes, surveying differing parts of the business on an on-going basis, building a picture of the whole business gradually across the year. The advantages in this are a continual flow of data and also the ability to spot problems early while they are still able to be dealt with at lowest cost. After all, you probably track customer opinion regularly – and your employees deserve no less.